ZiefBrief

CALI Lessons Go Mobile

With the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year, CALI has announced that its lessons will work on mobile devices, including iPads and iPhones.  Other enhancements are planned, including automatic saving of student lesson runs and scores.  We're looking forward to these improvements!

Who's Using WestlawNext?

Paul Lomio at Stanford Law Library conducted an informal survey to determine which Bay Area legal workplaces were using WestlawNext.  You can find his post summarizing responses on the Stanford Law Library blog, Legal Research Plus. Most important takeaway from Paul's informal survey:  public sector law libraries, including federal and California court systems, haven't adopted WestlawNext yet.

Happy 75th Anniversary Federal Register

The Federal Register is published daily, Monday through Friday, except offical Federal holidays. It is a wealth of regulations (new and revised), legal notices and executive actions. It is the "newpaper" of all the Federal agencies and the rest of the Executive branch. We just got the final print issue of volume 75 of the Federal Register. The final page count for volume 75 is 82,589 which falls a close second behind the year 2000 when the total was 83,294 pages. To give you an idea of how it has grown, in the first year of publication in 1935, the entire volume was only 2,268 pages (to be fair that first volume was only March through December.) Another way of looking at the full run of volume 75 is that it fills almost 12 linear feet of shelving. Because most researchers only use the digital version of the Federal Register these days they can't appreciate how much the Feds generate in a year. Attached to this post is a picture of the whole year, with a law librarian added to give a sense of scale. Click on the small image to see the full-size version of the image in a pop-up window.

Technology, Distraction, and the Latest Safari Browser

[Links to items discussed in this post are all gathered at the end, for reasons mentioned in the post itself.]

This week the zeitgeist has delivered to ZiefBrief a lot of musing about how our digital life may be affecting the ways we think. There's this week's front-page New York Times story "Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price." There are any number of reviews of Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. And there are blog posts and ensuing debates about the practice of "delinkification." (This is putting links at the end of a post or article, rather than embedding them in the text. The aim is to minimize distractions for readers who'd prefer to read the document as a whole. That's what ZiefBrief is trying right now.)

The concern the Times reports on and Carr frets over is that the more we flit from link to link to link, and the more we succumb to the distraction of the latest email message or text or tweet or Facebook update, the less able we are to concentrate on complex ideas for long stretches of times.

If that's so, ZiefBrief is concerned about the lawyers-to-be at USF and other law schools. We observe that at least some law students seem to find it hard to engage in depth with long documents. But despite all the technological changes of the last decades, the law is still embodied in long, difficult texts, and success as a lawyer depends on close, detailed reading, analysis and synthesis of these texts so as to exploit them to craft creative solutions to clients' problems. (Though ZiefBrief is hardly one to talk. We left law and became a librarian in part because we have the attention span of a gnat and would much rather help others find relevant cases than read them ourselves!)

No one wants to lose the benefits of our digital world, but no one seems to know exactly how best to retain our ability to sustain concentration and engage in deep thinking in the face of all of the distractions.

Which brings us at last to the latest version of Apple's Safari browser. If Safari calculates that you are reading an article, a blog post, or other long-ish stretch of prose, it will offer you, via a button in the address bar, the option of invoking the "Reader" function. The Reader function displays the text prominently while minimizing the surrounding graphics, ads, and other chaff.

So, if you invoke the "Reader" function while reading Berghuis v. Thompkins, the Supreme Court's recent decision on how suspects must invoke their right to remain silent, you'll see this:

 

… instead of this more typical view:

 

Oddly soothing, we think, and one way to reclaim your attention.

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Links for this post:

New York Times: Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price 

Our Cluttered Minds and Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain: reviews of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr in his RoughType blog on Experiments in Delinkification

Canadian law blog Slaw on Hypolinking

Laura Miller at Salon on The Hyperlink Wars

Berghuis v. Thompkins courtesy of Justia's Supreme Court center and Oyez.org.

Safari 5.0 is free and is compatible with Macs running Leopard or Snow Leopard, and PCs running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista or Windows 7

Mobile Apps for Lawyers & Law Students

Normally, I'm not a big reader of California Lawyer, the monthly magazine that you receive when you're a member of the California bar.  But Tom McNichol has a useful article on mobile applications for lawyers that is worth checking out.  One of the most tempting offerings -- Cliff Maier Legal Apps now has mobile versions of the Federal Rules of Evidence, Federal Rules of Criminal and Civil Procedure, portions of the U.S. Code, the California Evidence Code, and much more. 

Neat Research Tools -- Capitol Words and LOUIS

Just so we are clear on this, ZiefBrief is the alter ego for a crew of dedicated law librarians here at the Dorraine Zief Law Library. After surfing the web for a while, some of the members of the team feel like a spider on Benzedrine. We find cool stuff, which leads to more cool stuff, that links to more… you  get the picture – there_is_SO_MUCH_STUFF!! So we find a little item, you might call it “web candy.” But on closer examination it is so much more.

Take for example a recent discovery, Capitol Words. To quote the web site: “Capitol Words gives you an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available-a single word. For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words displays the most frequently used word in the Congressional Record.” Here is the latest example:

Fun, not earth shattering and you can add the site to your RSS aggregator and get a daily heads-up on what they are saying in the halls of congress.

"But Wait! (as they say on all the infomercials) There's More!!" Capitol Words is just one project of a group called the Sunshine Foundation (named after the Brandeis quote that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.") Another interest project they are working on is LOUIS (click here to visit), an acronym for the Library Of Unified Information Sources. Through LOUIS their "ultimate goal is to create a comprehensive, completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents from the executive and legislative branches of government.... LOUIS currently contains, in fully searchable format, seven sets of federal documents:

• Congressional Reports
• Congressional Record
• Congressional Hearings
• Federal Register
• Presidential Documents
• GAO Reports
• Congressional Bills & Resolutions"

So check out Capitol Words and the other works of the Sunshine Foundation today. Its worth the trip.

The Law -- It Just Wants To Be Free

Public.Resource.Org issued a press release today announcing that they will "release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose." They are able to do this thanks to an agreement they reached with Fastcase, Inc.
Carl Malamud, the founder of Public.Resource.Org is famous for his efforts making the SEC's EDGAR materials available to the general public for free. There is a great story about Malamud and his effort to convince West Publishing Company to allow his organization to digitize West materials at Tim O'Reilly's (of O'Reily computer books) blog.

ZiefBrief Breaks In To Print

We here at ZiefBrief never pass up a chance to toot our own horn and when the Recorder called about including us in a feature article about blogs in the legal workplace we jumped at the chance. Well, the article, A Blog of Their Own, is out and available at the CAL LAW web site. The article discusses ZB's humble origin as an alternative to a widely ignored print newsletter that the library produced. It also brings up the ZiefBrief's moment in the sun when a 10 minute call to the Archivist at the Yale University Library helped settle the burning question  of whether Anna Nicole Smith's first husband taught wills and trust while a professor at Yale Law School. Thanks to article author Pam  Smith for getting the word out about our efforts.

Seventh Circuit Wiki

The Seventh Circuit has created a wiki!  According to beSpacific, the wiki project was led by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook.  There isn't a ton of information on the wiki yet, but you can find the entire Seventh Circuit Practitioner's Handbook on the site.  Lawyers are welcome to contribute comments by following the registration process listed here.

Law Wikis

Robert Ambrogi has an excellent piece on Law.com this week, "Legal Wikis Are Bound to Wow You," which describes how wikis are being used to promote legal scholarship and "lawyer-to-lawyer collaboration."  Ambrogi also supplies a large list of legal wikis, including the Death Penalty Wiki and the Internet Law Treatise sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  What's a wiki?  It's a website that allows individuals to edit the content of the site collectively.  Wikis can be open to edits from the entire world, or they can be password-protected so that only particular individuals can contribute content.  What are the origins of the word "wiki"?  It's allegedly derived from the Hawaiian word "wiki," which means "quick."